Productivity & Automation · Published 9 November 2026

Best AI Meeting Note Takers for Small Business: What 20 Meetings a Month Really Costs

By The Business AI Guide editorial team

Fireflies, Otter, Fathom and Granola all record your meetings — but they charge differently and treat your recordings differently. We priced a real month of meetings for a 5-person team, compared the free plans, and checked who trains AI on your calls.

Nobody buys a meeting note taker because they love meetings. They buy one because the follow-ups keep slipping. Someone was supposed to send the quote, nobody wrote down the deadline, and by Thursday nobody can agree on what was actually decided on Tuesday. An AI note taker fixes that — it joins the call, writes everything down, and hands you a summary with the action items already pulled out.

The four tools in this guide all do that job, and picking the best AI meeting note taker for small business comes down to matching the tool to the work. Fireflies, Otter, Fathom and Granola record your calls, transcribe them and summarise them. What they do not do is charge for it in the same way, or treat your recordings the same way once the call ends. One of them has never used a customer's meeting to train its AI. Two of them do it by default. One of them is being sued over it. And the cheapest paid seat in the group belongs to a plan that stops working the day your team hires its sixth person.

That is why this guide is not a list of features. It is a month of meetings, priced out properly, for a five-person team — and then the four questions that actually decide the purchase: what does the free plan really cover, who trains AI on your calls, does a bot have to join, and what happens when the team grows.

At a glance

Prices checked 9 November 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page. Check the price at checkout before you buy — these vendors change plans often.

What the best AI meeting note taker for small business costs at 20 and 40 meetings a month

Per-seat prices tell you almost nothing about what a team pays. A five-person team does not buy one seat. It buys five, and the bill is the per-seat price times five, every month, for as long as the team uses the tool. So here is the maths for a five-person team holding 20 meetings a month, and then 40, with each meeting running about 45 minutes. That is 900 meeting-minutes a month at 20 meetings, and 1,800 at 40.

On annual billing, five users:

On monthly billing, five users:

Three things in that table are worth stopping on.

First, Otter Pro is the cheapest paid seat in the group on annual billing — $8.33 a user a month — and it is also the most constrained. Pro gives each user 1,200 transcription minutes a month, which covers a 900-minute month comfortably, and the 90-minute cap per conversation is fine for a 45-minute meeting. But Pro caps at five billed users. A five-person team sits exactly on the ceiling. The day it hires a sixth person, the whole team moves to Business at $19.99 a user a month on annual billing — $119.94 a month for six people, against $41.65 for five. That is the kind of price jump that never appears on a pricing page's headline.

Second, Granola is the only tool here with no annual discount at all. Business is $14 a user a month whether you pay monthly or yearly, because there is no yearly price. That looks like a weakness until you compare monthly billing: on monthly billing for five users, Granola at $70 beats Otter Pro at $84.95, Fireflies Pro at $90 and Fathom Team at $95. If your business pays month to month — and plenty of small businesses do, because cash flow matters more than a discount — Granola is the cheapest of the four.

Third, Fathom Team is the most expensive of the four on annual billing, and that is fine, because Fathom is the only one of the four you can use seriously without paying anything. Which brings us to the free plans, because that is where most small businesses actually start.

One person, 20 meetings a month. If it is just you — a solo consultant, a one-person agency, a founder doing all the calls — the numbers change. Fathom's free plan costs $0 and records without a limit. Otter Pro is $8.33 a month on annual billing and its 1,200 minutes cover your 900. Fireflies Pro is $10 a month on annual billing with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, which you will never fill. Granola Business is $14 a month with unlimited history. Fathom Premium is $16 a month on annual billing for advanced summaries and action items. Solo, the cheapest paid plan is Otter Pro — but only if your meetings stay under 90 minutes and you do not need the summaries Fathom gives away free.

What the free plans actually cover

Every tool here has a free plan. None of them is quite what the word "free" suggests, and the difference matters more than the price, because the wall each free plan puts up is a different wall.

Fathom's free plan is the most generous of the four and it is not close. Unlimited recordings, unlimited transcription, instant AI call summaries, clips and playlists, search across calls — all free, forever, for one person. The wall is the depth of the summaries. The free plan's deep, advanced AI summaries are capped at five meetings a month, according to two independent pricing trackers that checked the plan in 2026. Fathom's own page lists instant summaries on the free plan and marks advanced summaries as limited use, but does not state the number. So at 20 meetings a month, 15 of them get a basic summary and five get the full treatment. At 40 meetings, 35 do not. If you want every meeting summarised properly, Premium is $16 a month on annual billing.

Fireflies' free plan transcribes without a stated minute cap — and then stores only 400 minutes of recordings per team. At 45 minutes a meeting, 400 minutes is about nine meetings. A team holding five meetings a week fills the free plan's storage in under two weeks, and then it has to delete old recordings or pay. The free plan also limits AI summaries and gives 20 AI credits a month for the AI Skills and Voice Agents features. For one person trying the tool, that is plenty. For a team that meets every day, the free plan is a trial with no end date printed on it.

Otter's free plan, Basic, gives each user 300 transcription minutes a month and caps every conversation at 30 minutes. Read those two numbers together and the problem shows up: a 45-minute meeting is only transcribed for its first 30 minutes. The last 15 minutes — usually where the decisions happen — are not in the transcript. And since one person usually hosts and records the meeting, the host's 300 minutes is the practical ceiling for a team, not five times 300. At 900 minutes a month across a team, Basic only works if the recording duty is spread evenly and no meeting runs long. In practice it does not.

Granola's free plan, Basic, has no minute cap stated anywhere on the vendor's pricing page. The wall is time, not minutes: you can only see the last 30 days of meeting history. Everything older disappears from view unless you pay $14 a user a month for Business, which unlocks unlimited history. One pricing tracker reports a lifetime cap of roughly 25 meetings on the free tier, but another says there are no caps at all — the vendor's own page states no cap, only the 30-day window, so that is what this guide relies on. For a consultant who lives in the current week, 30 days of history is enough. For a business that needs to look up what a client said three months ago, it is not.

The honest summary: if you want to use a free plan for real work, Fathom's is the only one that survives a normal meeting load without a hard minute wall — and even there, the summaries are metered. Granola's survives too, but it forgets everything after 30 days. Fireflies' and Otter's free plans are for trying the tool, not running the business on it.

Who trains AI on your meetings

This is the question nobody asks before buying and everybody wishes they had asked after. Your meetings contain client names, prices, salaries, health details, legal problems — the most sensitive material a small business handles. Every one of these four tools sends your recordings to the cloud. What happens to them after that is different on each one, and the differences are stark.

Fireflies never trains on your meetings. Its pricing page carries a "Zero Data Retention" badge and the words are plain: "Your data is never used for AI training or any purpose outside your direct business needs." Customers keep full ownership of their data. It is the only tool in this guide with a no-training commitment that strong, and it applies on every plan including the free one.

Fathom trains on de-identified meeting content by default, with an opt-out in your settings. Its privacy policy says it "may use and create de-identified data generated from Meeting Content Information to improve our Services by training, improving, and customizing our in-house artificial intelligence models." The third-party AI companies that process your meetings — Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, named in Fathom's own documentation — are contractually barred from training on your data. So the training is Fathom's own models, not anyone else's. The opt-out lives in your account settings, and a team admin can switch it off for the whole organisation. One careful review notes the policy itself does not actually say whether the setting starts on or off — so if you buy Fathom, open the settings and check the toggle yourself before your first client call. All Fathom data is stored in the United States, with no European residency option.

Otter trains on de-identified recordings and transcripts by default, and there is no documented opt-out outside Enterprise. Its privacy policy, effective 16 June 2026, allows training on de-identified audio and transcripts. Enterprise workspaces are opted out of training by default. Free, Pro and Business accounts have no documented opt-out. Otter also generates voiceprints — speaker-identification data — from recordings, which its own Data Processing Addendum lists as a sensitive data category.

That policy is now the subject of a federal lawsuit. In August 2025, a class action was filed against Otter.ai in the Northern District of California (Brewer v. Otter.ai, consolidated as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, No. 5:25-cv-06911). The complaint alleges that Otter's notetaker joined meetings through calendar integrations and recorded, transcribed and retained conversations without the consent of all participants, and used the recordings to train its speech-recognition and machine-learning models. Seven people are named as plaintiffs, including people who were not Otter account holders at all — one describes a medical consultation, another meetings with a financial professional. In August 2026 the court granted Otter's motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part: the federal wiretap, California eavesdropping, Illinois biometric, unfair-competition and unjust-enrichment claims proceed. The case is active. Otter denies the allegations. These are allegations, not findings — but if your business records calls with clients, candidates or patients, the existence of the case is something to know before you choose Otter, not after.

Granola trains on anonymized data by default, with a one-click opt-out. Its pricing page FAQ says it plainly: "We do not allow third parties (like OpenAI or Anthropic) to use your data to train their AI models. Granola trains on your anonymized data so we can keep making Granola better. Each individual user can opt out of this in your Settings with one click. Enterprise users have model training turned off by default." The audio itself is deleted after transcription. So Granola's position sits between Fireflies and the other two: it trains, but the switch is one click, it is off by default on Enterprise, and the raw audio does not hang around.

Put side by side: Fireflies never trains. Granola trains on anonymized data with a one-click opt-out. Fathom trains on de-identified data with an opt-out in settings. Otter trains on de-identified data with no documented opt-out below Enterprise — and is defending a lawsuit about consent. If your meetings involve anything a client would not want used to train a model, that ranking matters more than $2 a month either way.

Bot or no bot

Three of these tools join your meeting as a visible participant. One of them does not, and the difference is not cosmetic — it is the first thing your client sees.

Fireflies, Otter and Fathom all send a bot into the call by default. The bot appears in the participant list with a name like "Fireflies Notetaker" or "Otter.ai", and everyone on the call can see it. For an internal team meeting, nobody cares. For a first call with a new client, a silent participant that is recording everything can change the tone of the conversation before anyone has spoken. All three let you control this to some degree — Fathom lets you choose bot-free capture, and Fireflies' Chrome extension records without the bot — but the default is a visible bot, and the bot-free options have limits. Fathom's bot-free capture is still in beta and works on Mac; Windows support for Teams is in limited alpha. Fireflies' bot-free recording runs through a browser extension, which means it works on the machine with the extension installed.

Granola never sends a bot anywhere. It listens through your computer's audio, so nothing appears in the participant list at all. That is the whole point of the product: the meeting looks exactly like a meeting, and the notes appear afterwards. It also means Granola works with any video tool — Zoom, Meet, Teams, or a call that is not on a video service at all — and with in-person meetings recorded through a laptop or phone microphone. The trade-off is that Granola records what your computer hears, so it cannot do the things a bot can do inside the meeting platform, and it records no video at all. There is no playback to watch later, only notes and audio.

In-person meetings deserve a word of their own, because two of these tools handle them and two do not. Granola and Otter both record through a phone or laptop microphone, so a meeting around a table works. A bot-based tool is useless in a room with no video call to join. If your business still meets people in person — a clinic, a consultancy, a property viewing, a site visit — that alone narrows the choice to Granola or Otter, and Otter's free plan caps each conversation at 30 minutes, which a real in-person meeting will exceed.

Fireflies in depth

Fireflies is the oldest of the four in this guide and the most built-out. It started as a meeting recorder and has grown into something closer to a sales assistant: it records the call, transcribes it, summarises it, and then pushes the useful parts into your CRM without anyone retyping them. Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Zoho all have native sync, and the Pro plan includes unlimited integrations.

What Fireflies does best is the work after the meeting. Conversation intelligence tracks talk time, sentiment and topic mentions across all your calls. You can build topic trackers — say, every time a prospect mentions a competitor — and the tool flags those moments across the whole team's calls. Team analytics show managers who is talking too much on sales calls and who is not asking the follow-up question. None of the other three tools goes this far into the sales workflow.

The pricing is straightforward until you look at the free plan. Pro is $10 a seat a month on annual billing, $18 month to month, with unlimited transcription, unlimited AI summaries and 8,000 minutes of storage per seat. That storage number is generous — a five-person team gets 40,000 minutes between them, which is more than any normal meeting load. Business is $19 a seat a month on annual billing and adds conversation intelligence, team analytics and multi-language mode, which lets a single meeting switch languages without anyone changing a setting. Enterprise is $39 a seat a month, annual only, and adds HIPAA compliance, private storage and custom data retention.

Where Fireflies falls short is the free plan and the extras. The free plan's 400 minutes of storage per team is the tightest free allowance in this guide. And the AI credits — 20 a month on Free and Pro, 30 on Business, 50 on Enterprise — meter the AI Skills and Voice Agents features, so the cleverest parts of the product are rationed even on paid plans. Fireflies also transcribes in over 100 languages with automatic detection, which is the widest language coverage here by a long way, and it claims 99% accuracy in English and 95% in other languages — its own figure, not an independent test.

Pick Fireflies if your meetings are sales calls and the notes have to land in the CRM. Pick something else if your budget is zero — the free plan will not carry a real meeting load — or if your meetings are mostly internal and you do not need conversation intelligence.

Otter in depth

Otter is the only tool in this guide that sells live transcription as its main feature. While the meeting is still happening, you can read the transcript as people speak, highlight moments, add a photo, assign an action item — all before the call ends. For a team that takes notes together during a meeting, that is genuinely different from getting a summary afterwards. Otter also captures slides automatically during virtual meetings, which none of the other three does.

The searchable archive is the other half of Otter's case. Every conversation is searchable by keyword, speaker and date range, and the search extends across the whole team's history. If your business lives in its past meetings — a consultancy looking up what a client said in March, a support team checking what was promised in April — Otter's archive is the most useful of the four.

The pricing looks like the cheapest in the group until the team grows. Pro is $8.33 a user a month on annual billing, $16.99 month to month, with 1,200 transcription minutes per user and a 90-minute cap per conversation. Business is $19.99 a user a month on annual billing, $30 month to month, with unlimited meeting transcription and a four-hour cap per conversation. But Pro caps at five billed users, and the jump to Business is the steepest in this guide. A team of five pays $41.65 a month on Pro annual. A team of six pays $119.94 a month on Business annual. That is not a rounding error; it is a different budget line.

Otter also has the narrowest language coverage of the four: six languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese. And the training policy and the lawsuit, covered above, are the real reason to think twice. The transcript quality is good — one independent review measured 92 to 95% accuracy on clear audio, falling to 70 to 75% with cross-talk — but accuracy is not the question. Consent is.

Pick Otter if you need to read the transcript live, or if your business runs on a searchable archive of past conversations, and your team will stay at five people. Pick something else if your team is growing, your meetings run in more than six languages, or your clients would not be comfortable with their words training a model they cannot opt out of.

Fathom in depth

Fathom is the simplest tool in this guide to start with, and that is not an accident. You sign up, connect your calendar, and the next meeting is recorded and summarised without you doing anything else. The free plan is the reason most small teams try Fathom first: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant AI summaries, clips and playlists, search across calls — all free, forever, for one person.

The paid plans add depth rather than capacity. Premium is $16 a month on annual billing, $20 month to month, and adds advanced call summaries, AI-generated action items, a conversational meeting assistant and a custom meeting bot. Team is $15 a user a month on annual billing, $19 month to month, with a two-user minimum, and adds a shared workspace, trackers, Ask Fathom across the team's calls and HIPAA compliance with a standard BAA. Business is $25 a user a month on annual billing, $34 month to month, also with a two-user minimum, and adds CRM field sync — the meeting's insights written into specific fields in HubSpot or Salesforce automatically — plus Deal View, which pulls every call on a deal onto one page, and coaching metrics with AI scorecards.

Where Fathom falls short is language and the fine print. It transcribes in 38 languages, which is respectable but far behind Fireflies' 100+, and Mandarin Chinese is not on the list. Summaries can be translated, but only between six European languages. The data lives in the United States with no European residency option. The free plan's deep summaries are capped at five a month. And then there is the acquisition: Superhuman, the company behind Grammarly, bought Fathom in September 2026. Fathom still works the same way, with the same app and login, and it still sells its standalone plans. But a small business choosing a tool it will rely on for years should know the owner changed, because the standalone product's future is now someone else's decision.

Pick Fathom if you want to start today for free and see whether an AI note taker earns its keep before you pay for one. Pick something else if your meetings are in Mandarin, if you need your data stored in Europe, or if you want every meeting summarised in depth without paying $16 a month.

Granola in depth

Granola is the odd one out in this guide, and it knows it. It does not join your meetings. It does not record video. It does not pretend to be a sales platform. What it does is sit on your computer, listen to the audio, watch the rough notes you type during the call, and hand you back clean, structured notes when the call ends. If you are the kind of person who types notes during meetings anyway, Granola makes those notes worth keeping.

The product makes most sense for the meetings the other three handle worst: a client interview where a bot in the participant list would be awkward, a sensitive conversation where recording needs to be discreet, an in-person meeting around a table. Because Granola records through device audio, it works with any platform and with no platform at all. It runs on desktop, iOS, Android and Apple Watch, and it follows you into the room rather than into the video call.

The pricing is the simplest in the group and the least flexible. Basic is free, with unlimited meeting transcription and 30 days of history. Business is $14 a user a month, billed monthly only — there is no annual price, so there is no annual discount. Enterprise is $35 a user a month. Business unlocks unlimited history, model selection in the AI chat, integrations with Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Attio, Affinity and Zapier, Salesforce as an advanced integration, and API access. Billing is per workspace member, admins included, so everyone with an account is a paid seat.

Where Granola falls short is everything it does not do. No video recording or playback. No CRM field sync like Fathom's Business plan. No conversation intelligence like Fireflies. No live transcription like Otter. The free plan's 30-day history means the archive disappears unless you pay. And Granola does train on anonymized data by default, though the opt-out is one click and Enterprise is opted out by default.

Pick Granola if a bot in the call is a problem, if your meetings happen in person, or if you type your own notes and want them cleaned up. Pick something else if you need video playback, deep CRM integration, or a free plan that keeps more than 30 days of history.

Once the notes exist, the next job is to automate the follow-up — getting the action items out of the meeting notes and into the tools the team already uses.

Head to head

One more thing the table cannot show: the AI assistant behind the summary. AskFred, Otter AI Chat and Ask Fathom all answer questions about your meetings — and the assistant you pick for that job is the same one drafting your follow-ups.

Best AI meeting note taker for small business: which should you choose?

There is no single winner here, because the four tools are not trying to win the same job. Pick by the job, not by the price.

Your meetings are sales calls and the notes have to land in the CRM: Fireflies. Pro at $10 a seat a month on annual billing buys unlimited transcription, unlimited summaries and 8,000 minutes of storage per seat, with conversation intelligence on Business. It is the only tool here that treats the call as the start of a sales workflow rather than the end of a meeting. And it is the only one that has never used a customer's meeting to train its AI.

You need to read the transcript live, or you live in your archive: Otter. Pro at $8.33 a user a month on annual billing is the cheapest paid seat in the group, and the live transcription and searchable archive are genuinely the best here. But count your team first. Five people is the ceiling on Pro; the sixth person moves everyone to Business. And read the privacy policy before you sign up, not after — the training default and the lawsuit are part of the price.

You want to start today and pay nothing: Fathom. The free plan records and transcribes without a limit, which no other tool here does. Use it for a month, see which meetings actually need the deep summaries, and then decide whether Premium at $16 a month is worth it. Just remember the summaries are metered at five deep ones a month on free, and check the training toggle in your settings before your first client call.

A bot in the call would be a problem: Granola. Business is $14 a user a month, the same price whether you pay monthly or yearly, with no minute limits and no bot anywhere near the meeting. It is the right tool for client interviews, sensitive conversations and in-person meetings — and the wrong tool if you need video playback or deep CRM integration.

If you only hold five meetings a month, the free plans change the answer. Fathom's free plan covers five meetings comfortably — five deep summaries is exactly the cap, and the recordings are unlimited. Granola's free plan covers them too, and 30 days of history is enough if you only need the current week. Fireflies' free plan covers about nine meetings before the 400 minutes of storage runs out, so five meetings a month fits. Otter's free plan is the tight one: 300 minutes a user and a 30-minute cap per conversation means a 45-minute meeting is not fully transcribed even once.

If the budget is zero across the board, the $0 starting point is our guide to the free AI tools that cover the rest of a small business.

If you hold 40 meetings a month, the free plans stop being an option and the per-meeting maths takes over. Otter Pro is $1.04 a meeting on annual billing, Fireflies Pro $1.25, Granola Business $1.75, Fathom Team $1.88. But at that volume the limits matter more than the price: Otter's 1,200 minutes per user covers 1,800 team minutes only if the recording duty is spread across the team, and the 5-user cap still applies. Fireflies' 8,000 minutes of storage per seat is the only allowance in the group that nobody will hit.

What to watch. Fathom's acquisition by Superhuman is the one thing in this guide that could change the recommendation. The product works the same today, and Superhuman says the standalone plans continue. But if you are choosing a tool to build your meeting archive in for the next three years, check before you commit whether Fathom is still selling the plan you want, on the terms you signed up for. The other three have not changed hands.

Method note

Prices and plan limits in this guide were read on 9 November 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page — fireflies.ai/pricing, otter.ai/pricing, fathom.video/pricing and granola.ai/pricing. Where a vendor's price cards did not render in the page text, the figures come from independent pricing trackers that agree with each other, and the article says so in each case. Otter's and Granola's plan prices fall in that group; Fireflies' and Fathom's were read directly from the vendor pages. No figure was converted from another currency. Prices change often — check the price at checkout before you buy, and read the privacy policy's training clause before you record your first client call.

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Frequently asked questions

Which AI meeting note taker is best for a small business?

It depends on the job. Fireflies is best when the meeting's notes have to land in the CRM — sales calls, client check-ins, anything where the follow-up matters. Otter is best when you need to read the transcript live or search years of past conversations. Fathom is best when the budget is zero today — its free plan records and transcribes without a limit. Granola is best when a bot in the call would be a problem, or the meeting happens in person. There is no single winner; there is a right tool for each kind of meeting.

Is Fathom really free?

Yes — the free plan includes unlimited recordings and transcriptions, instant AI call summaries, clips and search, with no time limit and no credit card. The catch is the depth of the summaries: advanced AI summaries are capped at five meetings a month on the free plan, according to independent pricing trackers. If you want every meeting summarised in depth, with action items and a conversational assistant, Premium is $16 a month on annual billing ($20 month to month).

Does Otter.ai train its AI on your meetings?

Yes, by default. Otter's privacy policy, effective 16 June 2026, allows training its AI on de-identified recordings and transcripts. Enterprise workspaces are opted out by default; Free, Pro and Business accounts have no documented opt-out. Otter is also defending a federal class action filed in August 2025 (Brewer v. Otter.ai, Northern District of California), which alleges its notetaker recorded conversations without all participants' consent and used the recordings to train its models. In August 2026 the court let the core claims proceed. The case is active and Otter denies the allegations — these are allegations, not findings.

What is the cheapest AI meeting note taker for a small business?

The cheapest paid seat is Otter Pro at $8.33 a user a month on annual billing ($16.99 month to month) — but Pro caps at five billed users, so a growing team is pushed to Business at $19.99. The cheapest way to start is Fathom's free plan at $0, which records and transcribes without a limit. Granola Business is $14 a user a month with no annual discount, which makes it the cheapest of the four on monthly billing for a five-person team.

Fireflies vs Otter vs Fathom — which should I choose?

Choose Fireflies if your meetings are sales calls and the notes need to reach the CRM without retyping — it has the deepest CRM sync and the strongest no-training commitment. Choose Otter if you need live transcription during the call or a searchable archive of everything ever said — and your team will stay at five people. Choose Fathom if you want to start free and only pay once the summaries prove their worth. And if a bot joining the call is a problem, the answer is not one of these three — it is Granola. ---